According to an investigative report by BeHardware, some Sapphire-made Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition graphics cards may be affected by a "black screen" issue. Some Sapphire HD 7870 users could notice random screen blackouts. A collaboration with AMD unveiled the cause of the screen blackouts to be caused due to a "noisy" GPU electrical signal (voltage is controlled by pulse-width modulation). The cause for GPU electrical signal noise is found to be bad quality ceramic capacitors responsible for conditioning power to the GPU.

12.10 and 12.11 beta show significant flickering and corruption in Skyrim and Tribes: Ascend while other games do not from my experience.
12.8 will show a black poly for less than half a second on rare occasion in Skyrim and Tribes: Ascend.

People have RMA'ed their cards to find the replaced card has the same issue.

This thread at GURU 3D is one of the two there which is all about the flickering.
There are probably links within that thread going to other forums as well.
i think there is a forum over in Germany talkng about the issue as well.

AMD forums have been removing threads on the topic for a while now not that there is any evidence besides dead links left by posters of other forums.
There are videos on youtube about the issue.

I never had issues like these while I benched and played with a friend's R7870 a while back, ran plenty of games on it, don't think TES V was one of them tho... or maybe it was, or maybe I'm thinking of my old GF8800GTS 320 on my ex's PC, damn I miss having my own rig.

12.10 and 12.11 beta show significant flickering and corruption in Skyrim and Tribes: Ascend while other games do not from my experience.
12.8 will show a black poly for less than half a second on rare occasion in Skyrim and Tribes: Ascend.

People have RMA'ed their cards to find the replaced card has the same issue.

Disabling anistrophic, surface format, and trilinear optimizations probably fixes this. I would rarely see that on T:A and figured it was due to my OC. I've had the optimizations disabled for a while (definitely improves quality on T:A) and haven't seen it.

Holy crap...Oddly enough I'm glad to hear this is an actual issue and not something I was mucking up.

I have a Powercolor 7870 (that originally came with the stock amd cooler), and almost certain this issue has happened twice. I kept messing with my HDMI cable and checking the seating of the card trying to figure out what the hell was going on...thinking perhaps I had lost the ability to do simple tasks like installing a video card, until it finally came on. Up until yesterday, it worked fine...when it happened again on a restart. I messed with the cable again, and the seating...and it magically came back on. I was pretty sure everything was fine before-hand since it's pretty hard to screw up plugging in an hdmi cable...now I'm sure of it.

Holy crap...Oddly enough I'm glad to hear this is an actual issue and not something I was mucking up.

I have a Powercolor 7870 (that originally came with the stock amd cooler), and almost certain this issue has happened twice. I kept messing with my HDMI cable and checking the seating of the card trying to figure out what the hell was going on...thinking perhaps I had lost the ability to do simple tasks like installing a video card, until it finally came on. Up until yesterday, it worked fine...when it happened again on a restart. I messed with the cable again, and the seating...and it magically came back on. I was pretty sure everything was fine before-hand since it's pretty hard to screw up plugging in an hdmi cable...now I'm sure of it.

The card has been working fine in games...and while you are absolutely right hdmi cables/connections can be flaky, this set (I tried two) has worked fine for a long time. I used to use the current one on my ps3 for over a year. I'm fairly certain the issue is related to this, as the screen did randomly display a very unsettling 'not-off black' while the tv still registered a connection to the port. It also automagically turned back on afaict. I'll wait for it to happen again, and if it does will probably follow that advice.

The card has been working fine in games...and while you are absolutely right hdmi cables/connections can be flaky, this set (I tried two) has worked fine for a long time. I used to use the current one on my ps3 for over a year. I'm fairly certain the issue is related to this, as the screen did randomly display a very unsettling 'not-off black' while the tv still registered a connection to the port. It also automagically turned back on afaict. I'll wait for it to happen again, and if it does will probably follow that advice.

What really I need to do is get off my ass and go back to dvi/audio out like I was before...it's what most people do that use this tv (it's a pretty popular option on AVS) as a monitor. I have been trying hdmi out just to see if the clutter convenience was worth it considering most of the edid issues have been worked out these days so there is little compromise. If nothing else, it may isolate my particular issue. Sorry for thread-jacking peeps!

FWIW, I totally respect the desktop devotees...was one for years. Now I really dig sitting on my couch with a keyboard remote most of the time (like now). If need-be I can still grab my keyboard/mouse off the shelf,raise the top of the coffee table, and game in a similar way. It's truly worth it for the media convenience imho.

What really I need to do is get off my ass and go back to dvi/audio out like I was before so...it's what most people do that use this tv (it's a pretty popular option on AVS) as a monitor. I have been trying hdmi out just to see if the clutter convenience was worth it considering most of the edid issues have been worked out these days so there is little compromise. If nothing else, it may isolate my particular issue. Sorry for thread-jacking peeps!

FWIW, I totally respect the desktop devotees...was one for years. Now I really dig sitting on my couch with a keyboard remote most of the time (like now). If need-be I can still grab my keyboard/mouse off the shelf,raise the top of the coffee table, and game in a similar way. It's truly worth it for the media convenience imho.

Ah, I follow what you're saying now. I don't think this was that, as I've certainly dealt with that before and this occurred during strectches I had not messed with any settings, but it's always possible. I am one of those guys constantly messing with everything though (as you say lining up edid, getting rid of panel processing etc can kind of be a fickle chore) so I can't rule out that having something to do with it. Perhaps I'll just stop messing with it for a while.

Either way, regardless if the core issue of this thread pertains to me or not...guess those capacitors replacements MSI et al pushes are doing somebody some tangible good!

I currently have a RMA with saphi re so I do know how it works with them. All their RMA's go through Althonmicro. I talked to sapphire support first, who then sent me to althon micro. Althon responded in less than an hour. My 7970 is currently with them in Los Angeles and I am awaiting any news.